'Last Jedi' Has Set Its First Box Office Record: Biggest Ever Sequel-To-Sequel Plunge

X-Men: First Class.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
Ice Age: Collision Course.
Transformers: The Last Knight.

These movies are among the biggest losers in Hollywood history, record holders for global box office mediocrity. They were all sequel films that made hundreds of millions of dollars less in worldwide theatrical revenue than their immediate predecessors in their respective franchises.

But now, one sequel rules them all.

That sequel is Disney/Lucasfilm’s current release
Star Wars: The Last Jedi. With China now clearly a huge bust for the picture, $1.4 billion in global receipts is a pipe dream, and even $1.3 billion might be a stretch. Which means
Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
will earn at least $700 million less in global box office revenue, and probably closer to $800 million less, than the $2.07 billion total of Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
may have immediately preceeded
Last Jedi, but it is properly classified as a spin-off, not a sequel, so I didn't include it in this analysis). That’s easily a $100 million bigger drop than the previous record holder,
Transformers: The Last Knight, which collected $609 million less than
Transformers 4's 2014 total of $1.1 billion.
The Last Jedi
is the new all-time champion of sequel collapses.

The Last Jedi’s apologists have claimed that it’s natural and proper that the film would earn less than
The Force Awakens, that this is how things always go with big sequels. But that’s simply not true. Among the nearly 100 major studio sequels I reviewed, 57 percent earned more than their predecessor. Even including the 43 percent of films that earned less than their predecessor, the average sequel earned $83 million more than the film immediately before it in the franchise. If franchise sequels always made less than their preceding pictures, the Hollywood studios would have been out of the sequel game a long time ago.

Pacific Bridge data

Biggest sequel gainers and losers

The apologists also claim that $1.2 or $1.3 billion is a huge total, and that on that point alone,
The Last Jedi
must be deemed a big success. I can’t deny that $1.3 billion is a lot of money, but the argument is nevertheless still fallacious in my opinion. It’s as if Disney invested a huge amount of money to get Albert Pujols in his prime, and after a 47 home run season, the next year he hit 28. Sure, you could argue that for most players, 28 home runs would be great. But for Albert Pujols in his prime, it stinks. Disney didn’t pay hundreds of millions for production costs and marketing to make a movie that will earn nearly 40 percent less than its predecessor.

To take this point further, just because a movie generates a big top-line gross doesn't necessarily make it a financial success. Disney spent a huge sum to develop, produce and market
The Last Jedi, it committed enormous and costly human resources to it, and gave it the year's most valuable release slot. The studio paid $4 billion for the right to produce
Star Wars
movies, so the amortization of that purchase applied to The Last Jedi
runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. All in, with production costs, marketing costs, studio overhead and IP rights, The Last Jedi's
breakeven point is almost certainly among the highest of any movie in Hollywood's history.
Will the studio make a profit on that investment? Yes, probably. But will Disney's return on investment justify its expenditure by exceeding or even matching The Last Jedi's cost of capital? Only Disney can answer that question for certain, but I'm skeptical.